Archive for Sept 2007

GovGab is a new group blog from the folks who run USA.gov (formerly FirstGov). They've been at it for a week. The articles have a personal voice and are related to finding government resources online. For example, the first entry is about Jake's hunt for an apartment and the online resources he used.Continue reading...

There was a time that people in the Drivers License Bureau didn't want to be in the ID business. I can remember having the head of Utah's DL bureau tell me in no uncertain terms that the drivers license was not an identity document. Times have changed. I can only imagine that the emergence of REAL ID has given the bureaucrats an idea of how much power there could be in being the primary arbiter of truth. This change is reflected in the sessions at a conference on REAL ID for state bureaucrats that Jim Harper brought to myContinue reading...

Our monthly CTO Breakfast will be held on September 27, 2007 from 8 until at Novell Cafeteria, Building G, Provo Campus . Despite it's name, you don't have to be a CTO to attend--just interested in technology, where it's headed, and the problems of starting and building a high-tech business in Utah. Here are future dates: Sep 27 (Thursday) Oct 30 (Tuesday) Nov 29 (Thursday) No CTO Breakfast in Dec Jan 24 (Thursday) Please reserve them on your calendar now. For directions, links to the Google calendar, and other information, please visit the CTO Breakfast page. If you've beenContinue reading...

I gave my tutorial this morning. The room was almost full, which pleased me. I didn't have enough time--never enough time--to get to everything that was interesting, but I think we hit the high points. I promised people I'd my my slides (PDF) available here. At the end of the talk, I demoed using a signon.com issued OpenID to log into Jyte and authenticated at signon.com with a self-issued InfoCard using the DigitalMe card selector on OS X. We didn't have time to trace through what was happening, but interested people can at least try it themselves and seeContinue reading...

Kim Cameron is talking about claims. Today's landscape is filled with silos. The perimeters are purposely impermeable. Users are reduced to the system's definition of them within those boundaries. Digital experience is organized from the point of view of the system, not the user--who employs many systems. There are gates at the edges to control movement in and out of each system. The technology landscape is rigid in terms of protocols, formats, syntax and semantics. The system represents a single source of truth. Users want to obtain a service, not be defined by it. We face all kinds ofContinue reading...

I don't water ski. Never been. But let me take a minute to tell you why it's a stupid thing to do and all the reasons why you should waste your time doing it--just based on things I've heard. Stupid? Doesn't keep people from doing the same thing about Twitter.Continue reading...

Some thoughts on identity from Phil Becker. Identity transforms security from "keep out unauthorized" to "allow access by authorized." Digital identity is the organizing construct for a distributed, service oriented computing that allows it to dynamically adjust to the needs of each user while simultaneously following the policies of various authorities who control and manage the data and applications being used, ad enabling visibility into what occurs. Identity today: Identity deployments now succeed far more often than they fail Identity virtualization and federation are prover technologies with growing deployment base Authentication has evolved significantly in response to use experienceContinue reading...

Dave suggests that we not use "graph" when we mean "network." To that end, I think we should further dismiss the confusion of the word "web" and avoid that in usage as well since it's less descriptive than "network" and not even technically correct. From now, on, no more "World Wide Web." We'll talk about the World Wide Network. Hmm, maybe not...Continue reading...

I'm looking for a used Cricket mobile phone to replace one my daughter has dropped one too many times. If you have one in good shape you're not using anymore, let me know. I'll buy it.Continue reading...

I'm building a virtual machine (VMWare flavor) for use with Rails development. After installing Fedora, there were a few things I had to do to get everything ready. I thought I'd take a minute and document them in one play for the next poor soul. First, I don't know what I do wrong, but the GUI auto-update feature seems more trouble than it's worth. I like doing it manually. So the first thing to do is: sudo /usr/bin/yum -y update I've found that the Yum system can get corrupted and hang (I think I do this by force quittingContinue reading...

Kaliya's doing an unconference for women working in technology called She's Geeky. Here's the goals: Exchange skills and learning from women from diverse fields of technology. \tDiscuss topics about women and technology. \tConnect the diverse range of women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical geeky fields. If you're a woman working in technology and would like to attend or just find out more, go read Kaliya's blog entry for more details.Continue reading...

Some people didn't like the yellow and blue badge in my post on promoting IT Conversations because it is animated. I agree in general that animated gifs can be annoying but this one rotates so slowly, I don't mind it. I've had it on my blog before and frankly didn't even notice the animation. Still, I can se why some people might not want to use it, so here's four badges that represent each stage of the animation. Continue reading...

NBC has announced that it will open its own download site for it's programs after a dispute with Apple over the price and DRM for its programs on ITMS. There are a lot of people who think NBC is mad to take their shows off of ITMS and maybe they are, but I think NBC and others are bound to explore their options in this brave new world. We call NBC, CBS, ABC, and others "networks" because in the old days they had to worry about distribution because of the limits of technology (VHF television has a 50 mileContinue reading...

I hate public radio pledge drives. Who doesn't. Nevertheless, I recognize the need. I hope you'll forgive this low-key request for support for IT Conversations. IT Conversations is easy to love--free audio that's interesting, relevant, and good quality. Admittedly I'm biased, but I think the popularity of IT Conversations backs this sentiment up. If you love IT Conversations, take a minute and show it. Here's a couple of ways: Become a member of the Conversations Network. IT Conversations is part of the Conversations Network, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation and a section 501(c)(3) public charity under the InternalContinue reading...

This is great essay from Raganwald on what users expect and IT fails to deliver. Hyperbole? Sure, but that makes it funny and just like antiseptic, the sting let's you know it's working.Continue reading...

Today, September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. My kids thought it was great fun when I woke them all up with pirate talk this morning and spent the morning calling each other "scurvy bilge rats."Continue reading...

I posted a short piece at BTL about the Bandit project's InfoCard selector for the Mac. There have been some solutions in the past, but they were hard to install or flaky. This one is solid and the install is a breeze.Continue reading...

I just finished reading Ike: An American Hero, Michael Korda's biography of Eisenhower. I'm a sucker for biographies, particularly US Presidents and I'd not read one of Ike before, although I'd had Steve Ambrose's two-volumn set on my list for a while. I saw this a few weeks ago while I was in DC and picked it up. I wasn't disappointed. Korda delivers a book that tells a great tale by focusing on what made Ike and made him great rather than getting lost in details that most readers won't care about. I came away with a newfound appreciationContinue reading...

A few weeks ago I reported that I'd put together a PC with my kids and it failed to start up. After trying a variety of things, I came to the conclusion it was the motherboard, the CPU, or RAM. A friend sent a note to say he had a couple of sticks of extra RAM I could try in it, so after a week of forgetting about it, I finally did and it solved the problem! The new RAM was from Silicon Mountain. The RAM that wasn't working in the motherboard was Kensington. Various forum postings indicated thatContinue reading...

Newspapergrl tells the story of a blog gone away at the hands of Wordpress. The moral of the story is that if you use another company to host your blog you're at their mercy. Everything you write could be gone someday without warning or explanation. The only way to prevent this is to take matters into your own hands and run your own server. Of course, that too is subject to the whims of nature and man, but you stand a better chance of controlling your own destiny. But what does this say of the blogging "revolution" if theContinue reading...

Over the past week Doug Kaye has been working furiously to change over the backend systems that support IT Conversations. The changes won't be immediately obvious when you just visit the Web site, but they were necessary in order to make future growth possible. There have been a few bugs associated with the switchover, but for the most part it's gone smoothly. If you do notice something that's not right, please contact me and I'll forward it to Doug.Continue reading...

I'm going to be doing a day-long tutorial on SOA governance at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum in New York on November 8th. If you register before October 7th, it's $695. After that it's $795 until November 5th. Then the price goes up to $895. Here's the details: Counterintuitive as it may seem, SOA requires more organizational discipline than previous development models. Your intuition might tell you that flexibility results from less rules, not more, but that's not the case. Standardization provides the underpinnings for SOA across an organization. To prevent IT from being overwhelmed by this new complexity,Continue reading...

In Fusion (and other virtualization systems) you should install OS tools on the guest OS to make it behave better. This is not something specific to Fusion, this is a general fact of virtualization. Usually, clicking the "Install VMWare Tools" does the trick--especially with Windows. Sometimes, however, it doesn't do anything. On those occasions you need to take over and do it manually. Here's how. First, mount the right ISO as a CDROM image. You'll find these in /Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/isoimages Select the right one for your OS. You may need to manually mount the disk. Fedora, for example,Continue reading...

Richard Stiennon has a post about efforts by EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini to make search engines block certain "dangerous words" like "bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism." So, since this post has those words in it, you may not be able to read it in the future. Or maybe Orrin Hatch will figure out a way to just have computers storing such dangerous words to be destroyed by lasers or something. The most important question: who gets to decide which words are dangerous? I vote that we add "Frattini" to the list.Continue reading...

Two of the people I respect the most, Jon Udell and Rohit Khare are together in one podcast: Jon's latest from his weekly Interviews With Innovators podcast on IT Conversations. Jon has a short write-up on his blog about the podcast and it's topic: syndication oriented architectures. SynOA was born on the open web and is now creeping into the enterprise. To understand why, just consider Facebook. It is a deeply syndication-oriented application. Although Facebook users never have to think about it in these terms, they are constantly publishing events onto a syndication bus while at the same timeContinue reading...

O'Reilly Media has several calls for participation that are due soon. Now in its seventh year, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference hones in on the ideas, projects, and technologies that the alpha geeks are thinking about, hacking on, and inventing right now. Do you have something that points the way to the future? O'Reilly Media invites technologists and strategists, CTOs and CIOs, technology evangelists and scouts, programmers and hackers, researchers and academics, artists and activists, business developers, and entrepreneurs to lead conference sessions and tutorials at ETech. The call for participation ends September 17, 2007. The O'Reilly Emerging TelephonyContinue reading...

Sean O'Steen, one of the hard-working audio editors on IT Conversations, had an article at Web Worker Daily on co-working in Berkeley. Sean's article discusses the concept of co-working in general and the Berkeley Coworking site in particular. If you're not familiar with it, co-working is the trend for developers, writers, independents, and other professionals to spend at least part of their day in a shared, public space. Starbucks, Borders, libraries, and other places that have Wi-Fi have been popular hang outs for some time and now people have started to create specific co-working spaces like the Berkeley one.Continue reading...

Here's the slides from the user centric identity tutorial that I gave this afternoon. The PDF won't show the embedded screencasts. I've included them separately. Here's one on using CardSpace and one on using OpenID. If you're interested in getting my Perl wrappers for using the JanRain OpenID libraries and the guestbook application, contact me.Continue reading...

Lamont Peterson, co-founder of NeverBlock is talking about XEN and virtualization. The talk is an intro to virtualization technology and a discussion of why use virtualization. Here are some pros: Resource consolidation: fewer systems to buy, own, manage, power, cool, etc. Unification: all VMs have the same "hardware" even if they're running on different hardware. Access and management tools allow VMs to be managed over the network. Utilization: most bare metal systems are under utilized. VMs allow that resource to be recovered. Fewer physical machines can improve reliability since there's less Of course, there are some cons: It canContinue reading...

I'm in Brad Nicholes' session on configuring Apache 2.2. First up he starts talking about MPM (multi-processor modules). MPMs control the multi-processing that happens on in Apache (servers and threads). If you install Apache, the default is the pre-fork MPM that doesn't include threads. You have to install the Worker MPM to get threads. the pre-fork MPM is more stable, but slower. The Worker MPM won't play well with mod_perl and other modules that aren't thread friendly. Brad recommends using include files to modularize configuration. I've never done this (habit) preferring to have everything in one place so IContinue reading...

Bruce Perens speaks to UOSC(click to enlarge) Bruce Perens is here for the second keynote of the evening. I spoke to Bruce on IT Conversations last March when he was last in Utah to protest the Novell/Microsoft deal. Bruce is not only interesting to listen to, but entertaining as well. Bruce gives an intro about why he got excited about open source. As I mentioned, Bruce has criticized Novell in the past (and will today). The conference is being held at Novell, but the security folks haven't thrown him out yet. How can "innovation" go public? It's not aContinue reading...

Matt Asay is something of a fixture here in Utah and clearly a big booster of open source (he founded the Open Source Business Conference). He's giving the first keynote of the evening on bring open-source home (to Utah). He uses Plato's Allegory of the Cave to talk about how many people aren't prepared to understand that FOSS is better and works. The prisoners, in this case, are traditional IT folks. This is changing; he points to a Gartner study showing people believe FOSS software is better. FOSS achieves ubiquity through exceptional software, focus on the product to driveContinue reading...

A string quartet entertains us while we eat and chat(click to enlarge) I'm sitting in Novell's Open Source Business Center waiting for the Utah Open Source Conference to begin. There's about 250 people registered, so a pretty good sized event as far as regional conferences go. Tonight is the open reception/dinner (there's a four piece string quartet playing in the corner) and keynotes by Matt Away and Bruce Perens. I'm giving a keynote tomorrow morning and then giving a tutorial on user centric identity and OpenID tomorrow afternoon. There are a large number of sessions in the breakouts tomorrowContinue reading...

Here's a letter from Steve Jobs saying Apple will grant iPhone early adopters a $100 Apple store credit in light of yesterday's price cut. Dave Winer would have settled for a t-shirt. Frankly, I would have too. Something very cool and commemorative. Maybe with pictures of arrows poking the wearer in the back! I wasn't mad at all about Apple dropping the price. As my pal Steve says in his letter: "That's life in the technology lane." I knew I was an early adopter and there would be bugs, bumps, and price cuts down the road. Still, I'll takeContinue reading...

David Cushman has brought together a lot of different pieces in a thoughtful article about Reed's Law and social networking. As I read his thoughts about our identity (personal rather than digitial), I'm reminded of a recent conversation Moira Gunn had with Goff Moore and David Thomson (podcast) about how we relate to each other in this first decade of the 21st century.Continue reading...

Here are the top ten shows (by downloads) for August 2007 on IT Conversations. Geoff Moore & David Thompson - Tech Nation (Rating: 3.60)Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Geoff Moore and David Thompson about how Web 2.0 is seamlessly taking the high tech lives of our young people right into the workplace. Matt Ridley - BioTech Nation (Rating: 3.43)Dr. Moira Gunn and David Ewing Duncan interview eminent science writer Matt Ridley, the author of "Genome." Drew Major - Technometria (Rating: 3.20)Drew Major is one of the true pioneers in the computing industry. He first worked with early CP/M computersContinue reading...

I loved John Todd's ETel presentation (podcast) on FreeNum, a scheme for bringing phone numbers to the Internet. Of course, I love identifiers and addresses and all that they enable, so it was a natural. Suppose you were a university campus and when you looked at your phone bill, you noticed that a lot of calls were to other universities. You've got a VoIP telephone system; they've all got VoIP telephone systems. You might wonder "isn't there some way to route these calls over the Internet and save some serious money?" The answer, of course is "yes" but makingContinue reading...

There are several user-centric identity events happening at the upcoming Digital Identity World. Identity Open Space User-Centric Digital Identity is gaining traction. OpenID is one of first of several efforts moving out on the web. There is a cluster of working groups working on various issues including Identity Schema's, Identity Rights Agreements, Interoperability with OSIS, protocols working together on the Concordia Project and others. You're invited to participate in a half-day Identity Open Space being held in conjunction with Digital Identity World on September 26, 2007 (Wednesday) at the San Francisco Hilton. Cost for this afternoon of open spaceContinue reading...

Scott Barlow sent me a pointer to this story about using cell phone triangulation data to determine traffic congestion. The Bangalore Traffic Information System is offline at the moment--Slashdot effect, I'm sure. Of course, you can tell more than how congested the roadways are. You can also determine commuting patterns--in aggregate--over time. When they redid I-15 through Salt Lake before the Olympics, all kinds of sensors were embedded in the roads to give UDOT this kind of information. This is a novel use of data that's already there to accomplish the same thing without the additional infrastructure.Continue reading...